Cartographies of Commons, Community, and Sovereignty

2016 University of Pennsylvania Graduate Conference
Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Conference Date: February 5, 2016

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Silvia Federici

Abstract Deadline: November 6, 2015

From the organizers:

The graduate students in Spanish and Portuguese at UPenn are pleased to announce their graduate conference focused on the transnational and trans-historical topic of commons, community and sovereignty. Additionally, the department of Spanish and Portuguese is able to provide three travel grants up to $300 each for graduate student participants.

The expansive articulations of the commons and community (as diverse interventions by Hardin, Ostrom, Esposito, Negri and Hardt, etc suggest) blurs the opposition between the global and the local, the public and the private, and exists in tension with the relevance, or even the legitimacy, of concepts of citizenship, sovereignty, nationality, and power. In the resulting space of ambivalence, one finds conceptions of bodies, communities, subjectivities, and territories that make evident the (re)emergence of the commons and its epistemological revalorization, and that emphasize the various ways in which sovereignty is dispersed and consolidated.

For example, in their work Empire, theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri address the 2000 Water War in Bolivia, in which Cochabamba residents led coalition-based demonstrations in protest of the soaring water prices resulting from its privatization. In their treatment, the authors emphasize that these protests, which ended in a notable victory for the public, should not be articulated as a resistance movement of a multitude, but rather as one that transcends the framework of opposition, proposing alternative forms of social relationships based upon the concept of the commons. While this moment in Bolivia’s recent history certainly retains cultural and political specificity dependent on its very particular context, it also falls into a more generalized set of issues that pervade these neoliberal times and that center on the concept of the commons.

For this conference, we welcome papers in Spanish, Portuguese, and English focusing on works from any period, from all disciplines and fields that address contemporary and/or historical engagements with the commons, and that interpellate relevant events and/or artifacts in literary and visual cultures in the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas, in both its lusophone and hispanophone contexts. In addition to any topics you may propose, we invite considerations of the following:

• Tension between the global and the local, the public and the private in the context of the commons
• The relevance/legitimacy of citizenship and nationality in the context of the commons
• The relationship between the commons and the state
• The relationship between the commons and the market
• Sovereignty, the state, and the commons
• The (racialized and gendered) body as commons
• Commons and community
• Levels of sovereignty: individual, collectives, the state
• Commons as space of tension between the state and the market
• The commons and grassroots organizing
• Mapping sovereignty
• Contemporary political uses of the commons: streets/plazas/resources
• The policing (literal and figurative) of the commons: who has access and who does not
• The digital commons